


Shadows On Glass

by stele3



Series: The Tether Series [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: (sorta) - Freeform, Canon Disabled Character, F/F, Gen, Judaism, M/M, Post-Series, References to eating disorders, compliant with Treasure Island, references to forced institutionalization, references to slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 12:12:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13434489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: “So you did find him,” the man says faintly. When Thomas looks up he finds himself caught in perhaps the strangest regard one person has ever given another, a gaze that absolutely does not dissuade Thomas from the notion that a feral, scavenging animal has broken into their home.--Many thanks to gvthrie on Tumblr for the sensitivity reading w/r/t Judaism and Jewish characters. Full disclosure: I am a goy and while the Jewish themes aren't super-big in this chapter, they will be later on. I'm also abled and white, and am writing a lot about Jewish, disabled, and non-white characters. If I fuck up in any way, please don't hesitate to let me know.I have included trigger warnings in the tags; if I've missed any of those, either, please let me know. Different installments of this series will have different warnings, so please pay attention to the tags.





	Shadows On Glass

_~Philadelphia, October 1722_

 

Thomas is wakened from sound sleep by a movement next to him. As has become unfortunate custom, his body reacts before his mind: he jolts away, head bumping against the wall above the bed and his hands scrabbling at the blankets. Then his mind regains its footing and he recognizes James in bed next to him, sitting upright, his eyes trained on the closed door to their bedroom.

“What—”

James shushes him and slides out his side of the bed. In the pale moonlight his white nightshirt glows faintly; the rest of him is dark and silent as he moves toward the door.

Thomas is about to call his name—more than once in their time here, James has sleepwalked: he broke their kitchen table in a fight with something he either could not remember or would not speak of upon waking, and another time Thomas found him clawing at their front door, trying to open it as if desperate to get out—except then he hears what must have roused James. A series of thumps traveling across the front room. At first Thomas thinks they’re heading towards their bedroom door and his waking panic regains him; but then they move away again, into the kitchen.

Candlelight flickers in the crack at the bottom of the door. Reaching it, James lifts the spar of metal that leans against the wall beside the frame, the first thing that James had brought into the house of his own accord when they came here.

“James!” Thomas calls in a whisper, hardly a breath in the dark.

The door is already open a crack and the faintest glow of candlelight falls on a sliver of James’ face, just enough for Thomas to see the coldness of his expression. “Stay here,” he whispers, and slips out the door.

Thomas, of course, springs to his feet. The wood floor is cool and he has to feel his way around the room, as he possesses none of James’ confidence in moving through a dark space.

Outside, there is a sudden rise in sound. Voices and more thumps across the floor. They are shouting but in whispers still, possible to hear but not to discern their meaning. Two voices: James, and another man.

Finding the wall, Thomas slides his hand across it until he gropes at the door, the doorknob, the corner that separates the hallway leading to the bedrooms from the outer rooms of their small house. He has never had good vision in the dark but Bedlam seemed to have somehow worsened his night blindness—a few of the ice water sessions gone too long, perhaps, or too little food.

So it is that when he treads on something wiry and slightly warm, he at first thinks there must be a raccoon or opossum in the house, and yelps, tumbling into the kitchen.

The whisper-shouting stops as James and an intruder turn towards him. A candle has been set upon the table in the center of the room and in its flickering light Thomas discerns pale, gleaming eyes, broad shoulders, and long black hair that hangs in tangles from both the man’s crown and jaw. The right side of his mane appears much shorter than the other and as Thomas glances swiftly down he realizes that he’d stepped on a pile of the man’s locks, already shorn and discarded on the floor.

“So you did find him,” the man says faintly. When Thomas looks up he finds himself caught in perhaps the strangest regard one person has ever given another, a gaze that absolutely does not dissuade Thomas from the notion that a feral, scavenging animal has broken into their home.

James rounds on him and the man snaps to attention, leaning back against the table on the far side of the room as if he expects a blow to fall at any moment. Indeed, Thomas realizes, James is gripping the metal spar in a white-knuckled fist, held at his waist.

“Get out,” James says between his teeth. “I don’t care what lie you’re here to tell, this is our _home_ —”

“Your home is entirely owed to _me_. _I_ found him. _I_ sent you to him. It only seems right that I inspect the harvest of my careful sowing. Lord Hamilton,” he adds, turning back towards the door as if there isn’t an armed man seething with rage standing three feet away from him, “it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I have heard of you only secondhand, but I hope you will forgive me saying, all reports have built a high esteem for you in my mind.”

He speaks in a low, sing-song that curls around the waist like a friendly arm. “Thank you,” Thomas answers, casting a wary glance at James, who is breathing hard and staring harder at the man’s face. “I confess that you have me at a disadvantage, sir.”

The man pushes away from the table, though he leaves one hand on its surface, and hops. The strangeness of the motion draws Thomas’ gaze to his feet, only to discover that he has just the one. The other leg ends shortly below the knee and has been replaced by a straight wooden peg.

“John,” the man says. “John… _Barlow_.”

“I see,” Thomas murmurs, his heart once again kicking up to a frenzied pace. James has told him little of the time he spent at sea: of Miranda’s fate, yes, and his version of events that Thomas already knew from tales of the infamous Captain Flint. Privately Thomas thinks that if he hadn’t had that prompting, the last ten years would have remained an utter void, unspoken and—to James—unspeakable. It is still sketched in vague shapes as through a frosted window.

But from the beginning, the edges of that darkened glass have been haunted by a singular ghost, one named as frequently in the legends as Captain Flint and also mentioned constantly in James’ retellings of those legends, but never brought fully into the light.

Until now, it seems.

“How the fuck did you find us?” James growls.

“Is that any way to greet an old friend?” Barlow asks of him with a smile that would be teasing if it weren’t strained tight over his lips. He shifts again, using his hand on the table to edge towards the door, and Thomas realizes there is a crutch leaning against the wall close to his elbow. In Barlow’s other hand, he has the scissors from Marielena’s sewing kit in the front room; he’d been cutting his own hair, Thomas realizes, in handfuls.

“Is that what we are?” James asks. “ _Friends_? Were you my friend when you pointed a gun to my chest or put me in fucking _chains_?”

“James—” Thomas starts but is cut off.

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” The beguiling tone in Barlow’s voice wavers, revealing something raw and stripped to the bone. “If you’d had your way, we’d all three be hanging from nooses or at the bottom of the sea—you, me, and Madi. And _he_ ,” he waves the hand not holding scissors at Thomas wavering in the doorway, “would still be wearing his chains on a slave plantation. I kept us _alive_ and you want me to, what, grovel in apology?”

“I told you a story once about a man named Flint,” James says. His voice is not one that Thomas recognizes and that freezes him in the doorway, watching instead of intervening. Shadows behind the glass move and paint the picture of this: a man in his nightshirt, his red hair tumbling down over his shoulders, gripping a makeshift weapon like he intends to kill, with a voice that has its own dark siren song. “I told you that he came from the sea, and then when the time came the sea swallowed him back up. Well, the sea has swallowed up Captain Flint, and it was _your fucking hands_ that pushed him under. He is not here. He is not _allowed_ , and neither are you.”

Again, Barlow falters—but then swift as any orator of Whitehall he shifts to a new tactic, setting one hip against the table and relaxing his neck, letting his head dip to one side. “Well then, whoever you are,” he purrs, and Thomas blinks, “I have a business proposition.”

Reaching into the pocket of his torn and stained coat, Barlow pulls out a small bag that clinks when he sets it on the table and spills out coins when overturned. Even in the dim light they shine. Gold.

Thomas sucks in a breath, the sound mirrored by James.

“We found it. I took the map from Billy. He…also led me to believe that he’d tortured you both to death to gather that information.” Barlow shrugs once, easily; but his gaze is fixed on Flint. “I should have known better.”

The memory of a different night, hot and humid, presses into Thomas’ unwilling mind: he doesn’t actually remember much, having taken a blow to the head in the initial scuffle. Several men had burst into the Savannah lodging house, quickly cornering James and pressing a gun to Thomas’ brow. Their leader, a hulking brute with burning eyes and a Midland accent, had spoken only to James, demanding something to do with a cache and an island. The words had slid out of Thomas’ ears without finding purchase as he’d tried to at least stay upright on his knees. The orderlies would drag him if he didn’t stay upright; they would take him either way but after it was over and he was back in his cell he could tell himself he’d fought.

“And Billy?” James asks harshly. The memory of that night sits heavy on his brow, as well. Through the fog of injury, Thomas very clearly remembers James standing above him in the aftermath, half of his face covered in blood, only the whites of his eyes and his teeth showing in the dark. He’d broken free, somehow, and gone right for the men holding Thomas, killing them with their own weapons.

They’d come further north after that, abandoning the warmer shores of Florida for the chilly safety of Pennsylvania.

“Dead,” Barlow answers with another shrug. “He was already ill from the sepsis—you’d left quite the bite wound on his neck.”

“Wasn’t me. Is it here? No, of course it’s not. Not all of it. Christ, you want us to what, sell it for you? Convert it to wares?”

“No, of course not,” Barlow says with infinite patience. “I want you to board me while I have it melted down and converted into British pounds.”

“Get out,” James pants. “Get the fuck out. You’ll bring the fucking account to our very doorstep with this—”

“Fuck your doorstep,” Barlow snaps. “You’ve already dragged every corpse into bed with you, don’t fucking _pretend that you haven’t_.”

“James!” Thomas shouts, lunging forward.

There is nowhere for Barlow to go, the table at his back and the hearth to his right, with no crutch in hand. He rears back against the table as far as he can and spits, “Yes, do you really want to do that, _James_? _Do you_?”

The words, and the hand that Thomas lands on James’ upraised arm, is enough to halt the descent of the metal spar. The three of them hang in the space that follows the absence of movement, a breath between halting altogether and a rejoinder. Thomas cannot see the scissors but he knows that Barlow has them.

Thomas is the one who reaches into the nettle and plucks the flower of safety: without releasing James’ still-lifted arm, he cups one hand around the curve of James’ jaw. He does not pull: James is not so foreign to him yet that he does not remember the sheer stubbornness that will fight any guidance simply for the sake of fighting. Howsoever James managed to rise so high in His Majesty’s Navy was and forever will be a mystery to Thomas, as his first instinct is always to rebel. Thomas thinks he must have had the most skilled and diligent superior officers that could be found anywhere, for if he’d sensed any incompetence he surely would have led a mutiny within the week.

In this particular situation, Thomas is by no means an unimpeachable expert, nor does he possess the right tone of command, and so he does not try to pull James’ gaze away from where it is fixed on their visitor’s face. He simply puts a hand on James and carefully does not think about the scissors or his own exposed ribs.

“By now our dear neighbors will have heard raised voices at the very least,” he says in at a pointedly low volume. “I expect they are peeping out of their windows and I also expect if they hear or see anything further we shall face an enemy force led by kindly old lady Greenup. Somehow, Mr…Barlow, you don’t strike me as the type to be murdered quietly.”

Thomas is mostly blocking the candlelight and yet there is still a faint glimmer in Barlow’s eyes, as if they shine with their own inner flame. He looks at Thomas and makes no reply.

“So, let us not have any murder in this house tonight,” Thomas says, turning back to James. The arm underneath his hand is already lowering of its own accord; James, however, has not looked away from Barlow. “Nor let us have any more shouting, or strange men coming and going from our front door. Forgive me,” he adds to Barlow. “I mean no offense, but you are not the picture of the commonplace Philadelphian.”

“I take no offense,” Barlow says and there is that look, again, a knowing smirk and the head tilted just so. It is as flirtatious as a whore lifting her skirt to her knees.

“Tomás?”

The soft question makes them all turn towards the doorway. Marielena stands in the hallway wearing one of James’ coats over her nightshift and holding a lit candle. The flickering light reflects in her wide eyes. Which means— _bloody hell_ , yes, Rebekah is there, too, standing in absolute silence only an arms-length away from them in the shadow next to the doorway.

A jolt of tension runs through their visitor as he notices Rebekah’s presence, too. Thomas very carefully continues standing in the center of them all and says, “It’s all right, Rebekah. This is John Barlow, a friend of James. Mr. Barlow, that’s Marielena and this is Rebekah. Rebekah and I met in Bedlam. Mr. Barlow, may I advise that you divest yourself of any visible weaponry _at once_ and make no movement towards Marielena. James, tell Rebekah it’s all right and John isn’t here to hurt anyone.”

“It isn’t all fucking right and he might be,” James growls, as though there isn’t the very real possibility that Rebekah will go through both him and Thomas in order to get at Barlow, if she thinks Marielena is in danger; but then he adds, “He’ll not harm either of you, I swear it. Maria…will you stir the fire, please? I’m going to put on some pants and then we’re going to figure out what to do with him. Don’t…don’t fucking _talk_ to him.”

He stomps out of the kitchen back towards their bedroom, giving Rebekah a wide berth and pausing only to speak a few reassuring words to Marielena, who edges into the front room. Rebekah stays by the doorway, her gaze moving over them all, seeing everything and saying nothing.

Turning back, Thomas takes Barlow’s measure anew. Despite the width of his shoulders, he is not a large man, and the way he bends to the side as he takes his crutch underneath his arm removes another few inches from his height. His eyes rove quickly over Thomas, linger warily on Rebekah, and dart out through the opening in the wall to watch Marielena stoke the fire in the front room. In the candlelight and the grey glow of dawn building in the windows, Thomas can see the dark circles that have smudged themselves underneath Barlow’s sharp gaze and in the hollow of his cheekbones. He smells of the sea and unwashed skin, of desperation, and very faintly of blood.

James had smelled the same, when he first came to the plantation. After the initial shock and joy had passed, it was the first difference that Thomas had noticed.

By now, many differences have been tallied in secret. For some time, Thomas had thought that he must have misremembered James—that ten years had warped the shape and bleached the color of his recollections; but then that person had gradually re-emerged from the man delivered to his arms. At times the process had seemed forced, as though James were dragging his previous self out into the light, pulling him to his feet and dusting him off. Thomas had been too grateful to question why: to be sure, he was all too happy to leave his time in Bedlam where it lay, and life on the plantation had been monotonous enough that the brief time they had spent there told James everything there was to tell.

But it has been three years since James returned to him, and Thomas has begun to realize that it wasn’t _James_ who came back at all. It couldn’t be, no matter how hard the man himself tries to pretend; he has changed, indelibly, in ways that Thomas has not. The fight in Bedlam was to hold himself as he was, to remain _Thomas_ despite the best efforts of the orderlies and nurses and doctors. James has been through an entirely different kind of battle, and the only man yet living who might understand the person James became in order to survive is standing before Thomas, eyeing their withered carrots like he might eat them raw and dirty.

“Forgive me,” Barlow says lightly, “I didn’t realize you had ladies in the house. I presume they came with you from the plantation before you burned it down?”

“Yes, though _we_ didn’t burn it down,” Thomas answers. “Marielena did, in order to aid our escape.”

Barlow takes another, slightly incredulous look at Marielena. Thomas can’t blame him: she’s a thin slip of a girl, of Spanish blood mixed with a Tequesta tribe, who had worked as a laundress at the plantation. Despite his predilection for male company, Thomas is something of an expert on the attractiveness of women—a consequence of spending any time at all in the company of Miranda, against whom all such metrics shall be set in perpetuity—and even charitably, Marielena is plain, with a thin face and a weak chin. Yet in his eyes, she will forever remain sanctified and glorious, for it was her soap-rough hands that had delivered them from slavery to salvation.

“I take it you have married her, in gratitude and out of consideration for the good lady Greenup?” Barlow turns as he speaks and the last few words trail off in volume as he looks past Thomas. His eyes widen. Thomas would guess that past his shoulder, Rebekah has somehow communicated annoyance at Barlow’s consideration of Marielena.

“No,” he says. “She is James’ wife, so far as the neighbors are concerned. James and Marielena Hamilton.”

Barlow’s face clears slightly and his eyebrows lift with amusement. He has a remarkably expressive face, though Thomas would wager that people rarely see anything expressed on it that Barlow does not fully intend to show. “And Thomas McGraw, I assume?”

“Yes. And you, Mr. Barlow?” Thomas rejoins with a slight emphasis on the last name. “Are you married?”

Something passes over Barlow’s face that he most certainly did not mean to put there, enough that Thomas can catch a glimpse of the person underneath, who is wearing John Barlow like a coat.

“No,” James says from the doorway, as if summoned. He has not only put on pants but a thin jacket, in deference to the Philadelphian chill. A robe, presumably for Thomas, hangs over his arm; but again, his eyes are on Barlow. “You wouldn’t be, would you? I told you she wouldn’t take you back.”

Barlow straightens on his crutch, gripping it tight. “She didn’t. Does that give you some measure of satisfaction, to be proven right?”

James looks at him and there is no spite in his eyes; only sadness. “You know it doesn’t.”

Barlow slumps back down. After a moment he starts toward the front room, then stops and looks at Rebekah, visibly—and wisely—unwilling to put himself between her and Marielena. “Ladies first.”

After a moment she obliges, silently separating from the wall and padding into the front room to take a seat at the table. Producing a knife from somewhere on her person, she picks up an apple from the bowl in the middle of the table and begins to expertly carve it into pieces.

The ladies safely on the other side of the room, Barlow proceeds to the table himself with a bobbing gait before landing in a chair, giving no appearance of noticing that there are only four chairs. James steps to Thomas’ side, unfolding the robe for him to slip his arms into.

“I told you not to talk to him,” he says, but without any rancor.

“James, really,” Thomas says, tugging the robe closed and tying its sash. “When have you ever known me not to _talk_? Marielena, por favor,” he says as he hurries into the front room, “deje de, you are not a servant.”

“Maybe I am hungry,” Marielena says, reluctantly surrendering the ladle as Thomas shoos her away from the reheating porridge. She sits at the table and pulls a face as Rebekah offers her a slice of apple. “You English eat like birds, nothing but bread and fruit. Apples for breakfast, bread for lunch, potatoes for dinner. I miss chiles.”

Rebekah says nothing. They don’t talk about it—it isn’t the kind of thing that they could bear to speak out loud—but Thomas knows that Rebekah’s stomach remembers the binging and purging of Bedlam as acutely as his own. Whole meals of rich dishes, laid out for them to devour, only to be forced to vomit it all back up. Bland food is a comfort; they were allowed to keep the bland food down.

Shaking away the memory and its accompanying burst of nausea, Thomas stirs the porridge and adds another piece of kindling to the sputtering fire. “Mr. Barlow, I hope you are hungry, for we eat prodigiously in this household. Even if it _is_ rather of the bland variety.”

“I fear I can make absolutely no complaints about the quality of food,” Barlow replies, and there’s a story there but Thomas doesn’t think it’s one worth digging after. He has a sense of these things.

“Well, good then. James, will you get the scrapple?”

James pulls a face. “Now? Wouldn’t you rather have it…?”

“If we have it at _dinner_ it will have rotted by then.”

“It’s mostly rotted _now_ , do you really want to have it at _breakfast_?”

“For God’s sake, I’m sure Mr. Barlow can attest that it is quite cold enough outside to have kept the scrapple safe to eat with a bit of breakfast, will you please go and fetch it?”

With some visible reluctance, James complies, popping out the front door to fetch the only bit of meat any of them—minus Rebekah—has eaten in weeks, a mushy pork loaf that they keep in a box outside to protect it from raccoons. Out of deference to Rebekah’s preferences, Thomas does not directly toss it in the porridge, but places it on a metal slab that he sets on the edge of the smoldering embers of their hearth. It sets there, grey and unappetizing in color, until it begins to heat and sputter; then, at least, the smell is somewhat appetizing.

Behind Thomas, there is a soft laugh. Turning, he finds Mr. Barlow running his eyes over himself, Rebekah, and Marielena before landing on James, who asks, “What?”

Barlow gestures, taking in all of them in one sweep of a hand covered with dirt and rings. “Your new crew.”

“No, they’re not. They’re my family. Will you try to steal them from me, too? You’ve stolen everything else.”

Again, the charm drops like a handkerchief. Thomas finds himself avid, drinking in the sight of this changeling man who James has hidden so well from him. Marielena looks slightly frightened; Rebekah munches on her apple.

Eventually James breaks their standoff, dropping his own gaze to the floor. “Tell us what you’re here for so we can be done with it.”

As swift as clouds on a windy day, Barlow regains his light mood, and their subject. “I need a bit of temporary lodging. Too many pieces of eight would draw the wrong kind of attention, but if some were melted down they could be presented as the product of gold mines from Cuba to more reputable businesses, and thus safely be converted to coin. Philadelphia happens to be quite forgiving of piracy, as I’m sure you know, and also possesses a wide number of smithies, a certain number of which would doubtless be forgiving of the form this fortune currently takes, were they to share in its bounty.”

“How much might they want in exchange for their services, and their silence?” Thomas asks, and does not react when James snaps a look in his direction.

“A third. Especially if they know that I am providing another third to my employers, who may also be my powerful and dangerous benefactors.”

“And would we be known as benefactors?” James demands. He stands by the hallway, as far as he can get from Barlow in the room without actually leaving the room. “What assurances do we have that you won’t make us known to every pirate still operating along the Delaware River?”

John considers him a moment. It is sweet and terrible, the look in his eyes. “None, I suppose.”

“I think we should do it,” Marielena says.

The men all round on her in surprise, for different reasons; she sits still under their gazes. “It is not enough, anymore, for James and I to work. The last year has been hard, and this year will be harder. Either you go work in the fields,” she nods to Thomas, who almost died working in the fields and would rather die before he went back there again, “or _you_ go to work…somewhere,” she nods to Rebekah, who is still prodigiously cutting an apple with a knife she might use on the flesh of any person she had to be in contact with daily, in any occupation, ever. “This could help us all.”

“Well,” Thomas says, trying not to make it too obvious. “I cannot argue with that logic. No, do not look at me like that—James, this is one-third of four hundred pounds. Of course, I defer to your reasoning but you must give us a logical, solid answer why we shouldn’t allow this man to sleep in our front room for a few months, in exchange for over a hundred pounds.”

He would wager that James can give many reasons; but of course he does not care to voice any of those reasons aloud. Instead he looks in desperation to Rebekah.

For her part, Rebekah appears to fully ignore them all in favor of finishing her apple core—but then she stands. Making her way around the table, she casts her gaze over Barlow, who darts uncertain glances at James and Thomas.

He’s just drawing breath to speak when Rebekah beats him to it: she says something in a language that sounds a great deal like Spanish, but isn’t. Some of the words match: Thomas catches _if_ and _hair_ and _out_ ; the rest remains unintelligible to him.

Barlow, however, goes utterly still. He doesn’t even appear to be breathing as he stares up at her. And this, Thomas thinks, is a new expression, one that he most definitely did not mean to show anyone.

He says in clear Spanish, “Pardon me, I didn’t quite understand what you just said.”

Rebekah does not seem taken aback in the least, by either the blatant lie or his denial. She merely repeats herself and holds out her hand.

After a long, silent moment he gives it to her, and she moves behind him. Lifting his curls in one hand, she begins to methodically snip them off, and says, “He will sleep by the hearth, for I will not suffer another Jew to be turned from my home. But if he speaks harshly to Marielena even once, I will cut off his penis and put it out in the street to be eaten by dogs.”

Turning away, Thomas slops some porridge in one of their wooden bowls, then crosses to push it in James’ hands. James takes it slowly; he is preoccupied with staring at Barlow, his eyes narrowed and his lips parted. Thomas says, “Well, it appears that the ‘ayes’ have it. How long will it take, Mr. Barlow, to melt down the gold?”

Barlow is still not breathing properly if his pallor holds any indication. His pale eyes track them all—no. They track James and Thomas and Marielena; at his back and armed with a pair of shears, Rebekah abruptly seems no longer a concern to him. Or at least much _less_ a concern to him.

Not that she needs shears to be a concern. It was her surprise attack that drove away the men that would have killed Thomas and James, and her bite to the throat that eventually killed their assailant Billy.

“A few months,” Mr. Barlow says at length.

“Well then, we had best concoct an explanation for both your presence and the ruckus last night, in consideration of the dear lady Greenup and her excessively well-meaning kind.” Dishing out another bowl, Thomas hands it to Marielena then takes a seat on the other side of the table. “I’m afraid James has already filled the role of Marielena’s husband. Rebekah has been given forth as my sister and I a dear old friend of James who has joined him in the colonies. I suppose you could be Rebekah’s paramour…?”

Pausing in her careful ministrations to Barlow’s hair, Rebekah looks at Thomas.

“Or not,” Thomas continues undaunted, long since accustomed to Rebekah’s looks, which might wither a lesser man. “Marielena’s brother, then, come north from St. Augustine and staying with us as a lodger while you recover from the accident that took your leg. Your Spanish sounded impeccable; speak only that to the neighbors, if you please, and I believe we shall have ourselves a bargain. May I suggest that you be an early settler of St. Augustine or the area? There’s quite an aversion to sailors in this area, after one brought the pox to Boston last year.”

Already Barlow is smiling amiably. His voice regains its sing-song playfulness. “Es muy bien, Señor McGraw. Yo era un albañil de San Agustín, hasta que vine al norte para visitar a mi hermana.”

Here he casts an adoring gaze upon Marielena, who flushes. Thomas checks Rebekah out of the corner of his eye but she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

“You came north a little early,” Thomas says, regaining control of their fable. “Thinking us all abed you came into the house in the hopes of settling by the hearth, but you surprised us in our sleep and we thought you a burglar.”

“Most rude of me,” Barlow comments, shaking his head.

“Hold still,” Rebekah admonishes.

“It’s to be expected of a Spaniard, in the eyes of our neighbors. But how did you come by the last name of Barlow?”

“Es _Barro_ ,” Barlow corrects. “Porque yo era un albañil.”

“Oh,” Thomas says, laughing. “Well played.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” James says, and strides out of the room.

Thomas half expects him to return quickly with the metal spar or some other improvised weapon; when James does not, he quickly makes his excuses and follows.

He finds James in their bedroom, having set his porridge down on the table that holds the basin in which they both wash every morning, leaning both hands on its surface as though hoping to pin it in place. He turns his head slightly when Thomas enters the room, but says nothing; after a moment, Thomas carefully and silently closes the door behind him, knowing that they are visible from the front room.

For a long moment they hang there: James wrestling with something and Thomas waiting him out. It’s a losing battle on one end, for Thomas has a lifetime of waiting, of enduring, and all of the fury and darkness that James tries to hide from him cannot hold a candle to Bedlam.

Finally James says, “He does this.”

Thomas says nothing. He waits. He can wait forever. He can wait for years, and has.

Straightening from the side table, James looks him in the face. It is…a whirlwind. Far too many emotions to parse. Thomas has seen James look like this before, he thinks, and a bell sings in the back of his mind. When has he seen this tangle of expressions on James’ face?

“He _talks_ ,” James says. “He manipulates. He lies, when it suits him, and tells stories. When I met him, he was—nothing, no one, but within a few _weeks_ he had the whole of my crew eating out of his hand. Within months they _loved_ him, trusted him, thought him their salvation. He has that power over other people.”

 _Oh_ , Thomas thinks.

 _Oh_ , because suddenly he remembers when he saw this expression on James’ face: in his father’s house, by his father’s table, after James had thrown his father out and Thomas had kissed him for the first time. Thomas had not understood then, either, at first; it was Miranda who had explained to him that love is not always a gift of discovery and gentleness; love is not always kind. Sometimes love consumes you, whether you would have it or not. Sometimes love is uncontrollable, and terrifying, and painfully inconvenient.

 _Oh_ , because James does not mean _just_ his crew.

“I am well aware,” Thomas says, careful to keep his voice light. “And if you think, my dear, for one moment that I have forgotten the lessons of Whitehall, let us be perfectly clear: I know precisely what Mr. Barlow is. I have moved lords of England to my will, I have manipulated and not quite lied but come close enough to count; I have told stories on a stage the heights of which I highly doubt Mr. Barlow has ever scaled. I have made men love me,” and here he deliberately rests a hand on James’ chest; James automatically covers it with his own, “and trust me, and think me their salvation. I have my own power and I promise you, James: it has survived Bedlam. It has survived Savannah. It will survive Mr. Barlow.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The small brick row house that they live in is at 820 Addison Street in Philadelphia. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9438682,-75.1559644,3a,60y,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sZqT_Z6mHAyDNaf1e5Jl-vw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
> 
> Philadelphia was indeed a haven for pirates: the legendary Captain Avery allegedly retired there, and even married the daughter of the deputy governor! Associates of Edward Teach (Blackbeard) were known to frequent the area, and pirates could expect leniency from the local authorities. As a result, the city became known for its taverns. http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/pirates/
> 
> I have never had scrapple but it sounds like the GROSSEST. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple


End file.
